Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness

On the phenomenological view, a minimal form of self-consciousness is
a constant structural feature of conscious experience. Experience
happens for the experiencing subject in an immediate way and as part
of this immediacy, it is implicitly marked as my
experience. For phenomenologists, this immediate and
first-personal givenness of experiential phenomena is accounted
for in terms of a pre-reflective self-consciousness. In the most basic
sense of the term, self-consciousness is not something that comes
about the moment one attentively inspects or reflectively introspects
one's experiences, or recognizes one's specular image in the mirror, or refers to oneself with the use of the first-person pronoun, or constructs a self-narrative. Rather, these different
kinds of self-consciousness are to be distinguished from the
pre-reflective self-consciousness which is present whenever I am
living through or undergoing an experience, i.e., whenever I am
consciously perceiving the world, whenever I am thinking an occurrent
thought, whenever I am feeling sad or happy, thirsty or in pain, and
so forth.

One can get a bearing on the notion of pre-reflective
self-consciousness by contrasting it with reflective
self-consciousness. If you ask me to give you a description of the
pain I feel in my right foot, or of what I was just thinking about, I
would reflect on it and thereby take up a certain perspective that was
one order removed from the pain or the thought. Thus, reflective
self-consciousness is at least a second-order cognition. It may be the
basis for a report on one's experience, although not all reports
involve a significant amount of reflection.

In contrast, pre-reflective self-consciousness is pre-reflective in
the sense that (1) it is an awareness we have before we do any
reflecting on our experience; (2) it is an implicit and first-order
awareness rather than an explicit or higher-order form of
self-consciousness. Indeed, an explicit reflective self-consciousness
is possible only because there is a pre-reflective self-awareness that
is an on-going and more primary self-consciousness. Although
phenomenologists do not always agree on important questions about
method, focus, or even whether there is an ego or self, they are in
close to unanimous agreement about the idea that the experiential
dimension always involves such an implicit pre-reflective
self-awareness.[1]
In line with Edmund Husserl (1959, 189, 412), who maintains that
consciousness always involves a self-appearance
(Für-sich-selbst-erscheinens), and in agreement with
Michel Henry (1963, 1965), who notes that experience is always
self-manifesting, and with Maurice Merleau-Ponty who states that
consciousness is always given to itself and that the word
‘consciousness’ has no meaning independently of this
self-givenness (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 488), Jean-Paul Sartre writes that
pre-reflective self-consciousness is not simply a quality added to the
experience, an accessory; rather, it constitutes the very mode of
being of the experience:

This self-consciousness we ought to consider not as a new
consciousness, but as the only mode of existence which is possible
for a consciousness of something (Sartre 1943, 20 [1956, liv]).

The notion of pre-reflective self-awareness is related to the idea
that experiences have a subjective ‘feel’ to them, a
certain (phenomenal) quality of ‘what it is like’ or what
it ‘feels’ like to have them. As it is usually expressed
outside of phenomenological texts, to undergo a conscious experience
necessarily means that there is something it is like for the subject
to have that experience (Nagel 1974; Searle 1992). This is obviously
true of bodily sensations like pain. But it is also the case for
perceptual experiences, experiences of desiring, feeling, and
thinking. There is something it is like to taste chocolate, and this
is different from what it is like to remember what it is like to taste
chocolate, or to smell vanilla, to run, to stand still, to feel
envious, nervous, depressed or happy, or to entertain an abstract
belief. Yet, at the same time, as I live through these differences,
there is something experiential that is, in some sense, the same,
namely, their distinct first-personal character. All the experiences
are characterized by a quality of mineness
or for-me-ness, the fact that it is I who am having
these experiences. All the experiences are given (at least tacitly)
as my experiences, as experiences I am undergoing or
living through. All of this suggests that first-person experience
presents me with an immediate and non-observational access to myself,
and that (phenomenal) consciousness consequently entails
a (minimal) form of self-consciousness. In short, unless
a mental process is pre-reflectively self-conscious there will be
nothing it is like to undergo the process, and it therefore cannot be
a phenomenally conscious process (Zahavi 1999, 2005, 2014). An implication of this is obviously that the self-consciousness in question can be ascribed to all creatures that are phenomenally conscious, including various non-human animals.

The mineness in question is not a quality like being scarlet, sour or
soft. It doesn't refer to a specific experiential content, to a
specific what; nor does it refer to the diachronic or synchronic sum
of such content, or to some other relation that might obtain between
the contents in question. Rather, it refers to the distinct givenness
or the how it feels of experience. It refers to the first-personal
presence or character of experience. It refers to the fact that the
experiences I am living through are given differently (but not
necessarily better) to me than to anybody else. It could consequently
be claimed that anybody who denies the for-me-ness of experience
simply fails to recognize an essential constitutive aspect of
experience. Such a denial would be tantamount to a denial of the
first-person perspective. It would entail the view that my own mind is
either not given to me at all — I would be mind- or self-blind
— or is presented to me in exactly the same way as the minds of
others.

There are also lines of argumentation in contemporary analytical
philosophy of mind that are close to and consistent with the
phenomenological conception of pre-reflective self-awareness. Alvin
Goldman provides an example:

[Consider] the case of thinking about x or attending to
x. In the process of thinking about x there is
already an implicit awareness that one is thinking about
x. There is no need for reflection here, for taking a step
back from thinking about x in order to examine it…When
we are thinking about x, the mind is focused on x,
not on our thinking of x. Nevertheless, the process of
thinking about x carries with it a non-reflective
self-awareness (Goldman 1970, 96).

A similar view has been defended by Owen Flanagan, who not only argues
that consciousness involves self-consciousness in the weak sense that
there is something it is like for the subject to have the experience,
but also speaks of the low-level self-consciousness involved in
experiencing my experiences as mine (Flanagan 1992, 194). As Flanagan
quite correctly points out, this primary type of self-consciousness
should not be confused with the much stronger notion of
self-consciousness that is in play when we are thinking about our own
narrative self. The latter form of reflective self-consciousness
presupposes both conceptual knowledge and narrative competence. It
requires maturation and socialization, and the ability to access and
issue reports about the states, traits, dispositions that make one the
person one is. Bermúdez (1998), to mention
one further philosopher in the analytic tradition, argues that there
are a variety of nonconceptual forms of self-consciousness that are
“logically and ontogenetically more primitive than the higher
forms of self-consciousness that are usually the focus of
philosophical debate” (1998, 274; also see Poellner 2003). This
growing consensus across philosophical studies supports the
phenomenological view of pre-reflective self-consciousness.

That pre-reflective self-awareness is implicit, then, means that I am not
confronted with a thematic or explicit awareness of the experience as
belonging to myself. Rather we are dealing with a non-observational
self-acquaintance. Here is how Heidegger and Sartre
put the point:

Dasein [human existence] as existing, is there for itself, even when
the ego does not expressly direct itself to itself in the manner of
its own peculiar turning around and turning back, which in
phenomenology is called inner perception as contrasted with outer. The
self is there for the Dasein itself without reflection and without
inner perception, before all reflection. Reflection, in the
sense of a turning back, is only a mode of self-apprehension,
but not the mode of primary self-disclosure (Heidegger 1989, 226
[1982, 159]).

In other words, every positional consciousness of an object is at the
same time a non-positional consciousness of itself. If I count the
cigarettes which are in that case, I have the impression of disclosing
an objective property of this collection of cigarettes: they are a
dozen. This property appears to my consciousness as a property
existing in the world. It is very possible that I have no positional
consciousness of counting them. Then I do not know myself as
counting. Yet at the moment when these cigarettes are revealed to me
as a dozen, I have a non-thetic consciousness of my adding
activity. If anyone questioned me, indeed, if anyone should ask,
“What are you doing there?” I should reply at once,
“I am counting.” (Sartre 1943, 19–20 [1956, liii]).

It is clarifying to compare the phenomenological notion of
pre-reflective self-consciousness with the one defended by Brentano.
According to Brentano as I listen to a melody I am aware that I am
listening to the melody. He acknowledges that I do not have two
different mental states: my consciousness of the melody is one and the
same as my awareness of perceiving it; they constitute one single
psychical phenomenon. On this point, and in opposition to higher-order
representation theories, Brentano and the phenomenologists are in
general agreement. But for Brentano, by means of this unified mental
state, I have an awareness of two objects: the melody and my
perceptual experience.

In the same mental phenomenon in which the sound is present to our
minds we simultaneously apprehend the mental phenomenon itself. What
is more, we apprehend it in accordance with its dual nature insofar as
it has the sound as content within it, and insofar as it has itself as
content at the same time. We can say that the sound is the primary
object of the act of hearing, and that the act of
hearing itself is the secondary object (Brentano 1874,
179–180 [1973, 127–128]).

Husserl disagrees on just this point, as do Sartre and Heidegger: my
awareness of my experience is not an awareness of it as an
object.[2]
My
awareness is non-objectifying in the sense that I do not occupy the
position or perspective of a spectator or in(tro)spector who attends
to this experience in a thematic way. That a psychological state is
experienced, “and is in this sense conscious, does not and
cannot mean that this is the object of an act of consciousness, in the
sense that a perception, a presentation or a judgment is directed upon
it” (Husserl 1984a, 165 [2001, I, 273]). In pre-reflective
self-awareness, experience is given, not as an object, but precisely
as subjective experience. For phenomenologists, intentional experience
is lived through (erlebt), but does not appear in an
objectified manner. Experience is conscious of itself without being
the intentional object of consciousness (Husserl 1984b, 399; Sartre
1936, 28–29). That we are aware of our lived experiences even if
we do not direct our attention towards them is not to deny that we can
direct our attention towards our experiences, and thereby take them as
objects of reflection (Husserl 1984b, 424).

To have a self-experience does not entail the apprehension of a
special self-object; it does not entail the existence of a special
experience of a self alongside other experiences but different from
them. To be aware of oneself is not to capture a pure self
that exists separately from the stream of experience, rather it is to
be conscious of one's experience in its implicit first-person mode of
givenness. When Hume, in a famous passage in A Treatise of Human
Nature, declares that he cannot find a self when he searches his
experiences, but finds only particular perceptions or feelings (Hume
1739), it could be argued that he overlooks something in his analysis,
namely the specific givenness of his own experiences. Indeed, he
was looking only among his own experiences, and seemingly
recognized them as his own, and could do so only on the basis of that
immediate self-awareness that he seemed to miss. As C.O. Evans puts
it: “[F]rom the fact that the self is not an object of
experience it does not follow that it is non-experiential”
(Evans 1970, 145). Accordingly, we should not think of the self, in
this most basic sense, as a substance, or as some kind of ineffable
transcendental precondition, or as a social construct that gets
generated through time; rather it is an integral part of conscious
life, with an immediate experiential character.

One advantage of the phenomenological view is that it is capable of
accounting for some degree of diachronic unity, without actually having to posit the self
as a separate entity over and above the stream of consciousness (see
the discussion of time-consciousness in section 3 below). Although we
live through a number of different experiences, the experiencing
itself remains a constant in regard to whose experience it is. This is
not accounted for by a substantial self or a mental theater. There is
no pure or empty field of consciousness upon which the concrete
experiences subsequently make their entry. The field of experiencing
is nothing apart from the specific experiences. Yet we are naturally
inclined to distinguish the strict singularity of an experience from
the continuous stream of changing experiences. What remains
constant and consistent across these changes is the sense of ownership
constituted by pre-reflective self-awareness. Only a being with this
sense of ownership or mineness could go on to form concepts about herself,
consider her own aims, ideals, and aspirations as her own, construct
stories about herself, and plan and execute actions for which she will
take responsibility.

The concept of pre-reflective self-awareness is related to a variety
of philosophical issues, including epistemic asymmetry, immunity to
error through misidentification, self-reference, and personal
identity. We will examine these issues each in turn.

It seems clear that the objects of my visual perception are
intersubjectively accessible in the sense that they can in principle
be the objects of another's perception. A subject's perceptual
experience itself, however, is given in a unique way to the subject
herself. Although two people, A and B, can perceive
a numerically identical object, they each have their own distinct
perceptual experience of it; just as they cannot share each other's
pain, they cannot literally share these perceptual experiences. Their
experiences are epistemically asymmetrical in this regard. B
might realize that A is in pain; he might sympathize with
A, he might even have the same kind of pain (same qualitative
aspects, same intensity, same proprioceptive location), but he cannot
literally feel A's pain the same way A does. The
subject's epistemic access to her own experience, whether it is a pain
or a perceptual experience, is primarily a matter of pre-reflective
self-awareness. If secondarily, in an act of introspective reflection
I begin to examine my perceptual experience, I will recognize it as
my perceptual experience only because I have been
pre-reflectively aware of it, as I have been living through it. Thus,
phenomenology maintains, the access that reflective self-consciousness
has to first-order phenomenal experience is routed through
pre-reflective consciousness, for if we were not pre-reflectively
aware of our experience, our reflection on it would never be
motivated. When I do reflect, I reflect on something with which I am
already experientially familiar.

When I experience an occurrent pain, perception, or thought, the
experience in question is given immediately and noninferentially. I do
not have to judge or appeal to some criteria in order to identify it
as my experience. There are no free-floating experiences;
even the experience of freely-floating belongs to someone. As William
James (1890) put it, all experience is “personal.” Even in
pathological cases, as in depersonalization or schizophrenic symptoms
of delusions of control or thought insertion, a feeling or experience
that the subject claims not to be his is nonetheless experienced by
him as being part of his stream of consciousness. The complaint of
thought insertion, for example, necessarily acknowledges that the
inserted thoughts are thoughts that belong to the subject's
experience, even as the agency for such thoughts are attributed to
others. This first-person character entails an implicit experiential
self-reference. If I feel hungry or see my friend, I cannot be
mistaken about who the subject of that experience is, even if I can be
mistaken about it being hunger (perhaps it's really thirst), or about
it being my friend (perhaps it's his twin), or even about whether I am
actually seeing him (I may be hallucinating). As Wittgenstein (1958),
Shoemaker (1968), and others have pointed out, it is nonsensical to
ask whether I am sure that I am the one who feels
hungry. This is the phenomenon known as “immunity to error
through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun.”
To this idea of immunity to error through misidentification, the
phenomenologist adds that whether a certain experience is experienced
as mine, or not, does not depend upon something apart from the
experience, but depends precisely upon the pre-reflective givenness
that belongs to the structure of the experience (Husserl 1959, 175;
Husserl 1973a, 28, 56, 307, 443; see Zahavi 1999, 6ff.).

Some philosophers who are inclined to take self-consciousness to be
intrinsically linked to the issue of self-reference would argue that
the latter depends on a first-person concept. One attains
self-consciousness only when one can conceive of oneself
as oneself, and has the linguistic ability to use the
first-person pronoun to refer to oneself (Baker 2000, 68; cf. Lowe
2000, 264). On this view, self-consciousness is something that emerges
in the course of a developmental process, and depends on the
acquisition of concepts and language. Accordingly, some philosophers
deny that young children are capable of self-consciousness (Carruthers
1996; Dennett 1976; Wilkes 1988; also see Flavell 1993). Evidence from
developmental psychology and ecological psychology, however, suggests
that there is a primitive, proprioceptive form of self-consciousness
already in place from
birth.[3]
This primitive self-awareness precedes the mastery of language and
the ability to form conceptually informed judgments, and it may serve
as a basis for more advanced types of self-consciousness (see, e.g.,
Butterworth 1995, 1999; Gibson 1986; Meltzoff 1990a, 1990b; Neisser
1988; and Stern 1985). The phenomenological view is consistent with
these findings.

It is customary to distinguish between two uses of the term
‘conscious’, a transitive and an intransitive use. On the
one hand, we can speak of our being conscious of something, be it
x, y, or z. On the other we can speak of
our being conscious simpliciter (rather than non-conscious). For the
past two or three decades, a widespread way to account for intransitive
consciousness in cognitive science and analytical philosophy of mind
has been by means of some kind of higher-order theory. The distinction
between conscious and non-conscious mental states has been taken to
rest upon the presence or absence of a relevant meta-mental state
(cf. Armstrong 1968; Lycan 1987,1996; Carruthers 1996, 2000; Rosenthal
1997). Thus, intransitive consciousness has been taken to be a
question of the mind directing its intentional aim at its own states
and operations. As Carruthers puts it, the subjective feel of
experience presupposes a capacity for higher-order awareness, and as
he then continues, “such self-awareness is a conceptually
necessary condition for an organism to be a subject of phenomenal
feelings, or for there to be anything that its experiences are
like” (Carruthers 1996, 152). But for Carruthers, the
self-awareness in question is a type of reflection. In his view, a
creature must be capable of reflecting upon, thinking about, and hence
conceptualizing its own mental states if those mental states are to be
states of which the creature is aware (Carruthers 1996, 155, 157).

One might share the view that there is a close link between
consciousness and self-consciousness and still disagree about the
nature of the link. And although the phenomenological view might
superficially resemble the view of the higher-order theories, we are
ultimately confronted with two radically divergent accounts. The
phenomenologists explicitly deny that the self-consciousness that is
present the moment I consciously experience something is to be
understood in terms of some kind of higher-order monitoring. It does
not involve an additional mental state, but is rather to be understood
as an intrinsic feature of the primary experience. That is, in
contrast to higher-order accounts of consciousness that claim that
consciousness is an extrinsic or relational property of those mental
states that have it, a property bestowed upon them from without by
some further state, the phenomenologists would typically argue that
the feature in virtue of which a mental state is conscious is an
intrinsic property of those mental states that have it. Moreover, the
phenomenologists also reject the attempt to construe intransitive
consciousness in terms of transitive consciousness, that is, they
reject the view that a conscious state is a state we are conscious of
as object. To put it differently, not only do they reject the
view that a mental state becomes conscious by being taken as an object
by a higher-order state, they also reject the view (generally
associated with Brentano) according to which a mental state becomes
conscious by taking itself as an object (cf. Zahavi 2004, 2006).

What arguments support the phenomenological claims, however? The
traditional phenomenological approach is to appeal to a correct
phenomenological description and maintain that this is the best
argument to be found. But if one were to look for an additional, more
theoretical, argument, what would one find? One line of reasoning
found in virtually all of the phenomenologists is the view that the
attempt to let (intransitive) consciousness be a result of a
higher-order monitoring will generate an infinite regress. On the face
of it, this is a rather old idea. Typically, the regress argument has
been understood in the following manner. If all occurrent mental
states are conscious in the sense of being taken as objects by
occurrent second-order mental states, then these second-order mental
states must themselves be taken as objects by occurrent third-order
mental states, and so forth ad infinitum. The standard
response to this phenomenological objection is that the regress can
easily be avoided by accepting the existence of non-conscious mental
states. This is precisely the position adopted by the defenders of
higher-order theory. For them a second-order perception or thought
does not have to be conscious. It would be conscious only if
accompanied by a (non-conscious) third-order thought or perception
(cf. Rosenthal 1997, 745). The phenomenological reply to this
solution is rather straightforward, however. The phenomenologists
would concede that it is possible to halt the regress by postulating
the existence of non-conscious mental states, but they would maintain
that such an appeal to the non-conscious leaves us with a case of
explanatory vacuity. That is, they would find it quite unclear why the
relation between two otherwise non-conscious processes should make one
of them conscious. Or to put it differently, they would be quite
unconvinced by the claim that a state without subjective or phenomenal
qualities can be transformed into one with such qualities, i.e., into
an experience with first-personal character or mineness, by the mere
relational addition of a non-conscious meta-state having the first-state as its
intentional object.

The phenomenological alternative is to insist on the existence of
pre-reflective self-consciousness. As Sartre writes: “[T]here is
no infinite regress here, since a consciousness has no need at all of
a reflecting [higher-order]consciousness in order to be conscious of
itself. It simply does not posit itself as an object” (Sartre
1936, 29 [1957, 45]). That is, pre-reflective self-consciousness is
not transitive in relation to the state (of) which it is aware. It
is, as Sartre puts it, the mode of existence of consciousness itself.
This does not mean that a higher-order representation is impossible,
but merely that it always presupposes the existence of a prior
non-objectifying, pre-reflective self-consciousness as its condition
of possibility. To quote Sartre again, “it is the non-reflective
consciousness which renders the reflection [and any higher-order
representation of it] possible” (1943, 20 [1956, liii]).

Although, as pre-reflectively self-aware of my experience I am not
unconscious of it, I do not attend to it; rather I tend to overlook it
in favor of the object that I am perceiving, the thing I am
remembering, etc. In my everyday life, I am absorbed by and
preoccupied with projects and objects in the world, and as such I do
not attend to my experiential life. Therefore, this pervasive
pre-reflective self-consciousness is not to be understood as complete
self-comprehension. One can accept the notion of a pervasive
self-consciousness and still accept the existence of the unconscious
in the sense of subjective components which remain ambiguous, obscure,
and resistant to comprehension. Thus, one should distinguish between
the claim that consciousness is characterized by an immediate
first-person character and the claim that consciousness is
characterized by total self-transparency. One can easily accept the
first and reject the latter (Ricoeur 1950, 354–355).

In contrast to pre-reflective self-consciousness, which delivers an
implicit sense of self at an experiential or phenomenal level,
reflective self-consciousness is an explicit, conceptual, and
objectifying awareness that takes a lower-order consciousness as its
attentional theme. I am able at any time to attend directly to the
cognitive experience itself, turning my experience itself into the
object of my consideration.

Phenomenologists do not claim the infallible authority of reflection
over subjective experience. There are no epistemic guarantees
connected with self-consciousness other than immunity to error through
misidentification. If I cannot be wrong about who is living through my
experiences, I can be wrong about all kinds of other things about my
experiences. A brief consideration of the phenomenology of temporality
will help to explain this, namely, why reflective self-consciousness
is characterized by certain limitations. It will also help to clarify
how pre-reflective self-consciousness, as a mode of existence, is
possible in the first place, as well as elucidate the phenomenological
account of diachronic unity, an account that
does not posit something called the “self” as a separate
entity over and above the stream of consciousness (cf. Zahavi 2014).

According to Husserl's analysis, experience of any sort (perception,
memory, imagination, etc.) has a common temporal structure such that
any moment of experience contains a retentional reference to past
moments of experience, a current openness (primal impression) to what
is present, and a protentional anticipation of the moments of
experience that are just about to happen (see Gallagher 1998). The
retentional structure of experience, that is, the fact that when I am
experiencing something, each passing moment of consciousness does not
simply disappear at the next moment but is kept in intentional
currency, constitutes a coherency that stretches over an experienced
temporal duration. Husserl's favorite example is a melody. When I
experience a melody, I don't simply experience a knife-edge
presentation (primal impression) of one note, which is then completely
washed away and replaced with the next discrete knife-edge
presentation of the next note. Rather, consciousness retains the sense
of the first note as just past, as I hear the second note, a hearing
that is also enriched by an anticipation (protention) of the next note
(or at least, in case I do not know the melody, of the fact that there
will be a next note, or some next auditory event). Husserl claims that
we actually do perceive melodies—in opposition to an earlier
view of Brentano, viz., that we with the help of our imagination or recollection construct or reconstruct such unities
out of a synthesis of mental acts. This is possible only because
consciousness is so structured to allow for this temporal
presentation.

Importantly, the temporal (retentional-impressional-protentional)
structure of consciousness not only allows for the experience of
temporally extended objects or intentional contents, but also entails
the self-manifestation of consciousness, that is, its pre-reflective
self-awareness. The retention of past notes of the melody is
accomplished, not by a “real” or literal re-presentation
of the notes (as if I were hearing them a second time and
simultaneously with the current note), but by an intentional retaining
of my just past experience of the melody as just past. This
means that there is a primary and simultaneous self-awareness (an
awareness of my ongoing experience in the ongoing flow of experience)
that is implicit in my experience of the object. At the same time
that I am aware of a melody, for example, I am co-aware of my
ongoing experience of the melody through the retentional
structure of that very experience—and this just is the
pre-reflective self-awareness of experience (cf. Zahavi 2003).

The temporal structure that accounts for pre-reflective self-awareness
is also the structural feature that accounts for the limitations
imposed on reflective self-consciousness. Reflective
self-consciousness yields knowledge of pre-reflective subjectivity
that is always after the fact. Reflective self-consciousness, which
takes pre-reflective experience as its object, is itself (like any
conscious experience) characterized by the same temporal structure. In
principle, however, the retentional-impressional-protentional
structure of reflection cannot overlay the
retentional-impressional-protentional structure of pre-reflective
experience in complete simultaneity. There is always a slight delay
between reflection and the pre-reflective object of reflection. One
might say that the pre-reflective experience must first be there if I
am to turn my reflective attention to it and make it an object of
reflection. Husserl writes: “When I say
I, I grasp myself in a simple reflection. But this
self-experience [Selbsterfahrung] is like every experience
[Erfahrung], and in particular every perception, a mere
directing myself towards something that was already there for me, that
was already conscious, but not thematically experienced, not
noticed” (Husserl 1973b, 492–493). This delay is one of the reasons why there remains a
difference or distance between the reflecting subject
and the reflected object, even though the reflected object is my own
experience. As a reflecting subject, I never fully coincide with
myself. When I reflect, there is always something about my experience
which will evade my reflective grasp: the very reflective moment
itself.

As Merleau-Ponty puts it, our temporal
existence is both a condition for and an obstacle to our
self-comprehension. Temporality contains an internal fracture that
permits us to return to our past experiences in order to investigate
them reflectively, but this very fracture also prevents us from fully
coinciding with ourselves. There will always remain a difference
between the lived and the understood (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 76, 397,
399, 460). Self-consciousness provides us with the sense that we are
always already in play. This leads some phenomenologists to note that
we are born (or “thrown” into the world) and not
self-generated. We are caught up in a life that is in excess of our
full comprehension (Heidegger 1986). There is always something about
ourselves that we cannot fully capture in self-conscious
reflection.

If reflective self-consciousness is limited in this way, this should not prevent us from exercising it. Indeed,
reflective self-consciousness is a necessary condition for moral
self-responsibility, as Husserl points out. Reflection is a
precondition for self-critical deliberation. If we are to subject our
different beliefs and desires to a critical, normative evaluation, it
is not sufficient simply to have immediate first-personal access to
the states in question.

We take as our point of departure the essential ability
for self-consciousness in the full sense of personal self-inspection
(inspectio sui), and the ability that is based on this for
taking up positions that are reflectively directed back on oneself and
one's own life, on personal acts of self-knowledge, self-evaluation,
and practical acts of self-determination, self-willing, and
self-formation. (Husserl 1988, 23).

Self-consciousness is, therefore, not epiphenomenal. Our ability
to make reflective judgments about our own beliefs and desires also
allows us to modify them.

One might see the position of Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty as
being situated between two extremes. On the one hand, we have the view
that reflection merely copies or mirrors pre-reflective experience
faithfully, and on the other hand we have the view that reflection
distorts lived experience. The middle course is to recognize that
reflection involves a gain and a loss. For Husserl, Sartre, and
Merleau-Ponty, reflection is constrained by what is pre-reflectively
lived through. It is answerable to experiential facts and is not
constitutively self-fulfilling. At the same time, however, they
recognized that reflection qua thematic self-experience does
not simply reproduce the lived experiences unaltered and that this is
precisely what makes reflection cognitively valuable. The experiences
reflected upon are transformed in the process, to various degrees and
manners depending upon the type of reflection at work. Subjectivity
consequently seems to be constituted in such a fashion that it can
and, at times, must relate to itself in an “othering”
manner. This self-alteration is something inherent to reflection; it
is not something that reflection can overcome.

Much of what we have said about self-consciousness may still seem
overly mentalistic. It is important to note that for phenomenologists
like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, pre-reflective self-awareness is both
embodied and embedded in the world. The first-person point of view on
the world is never a view from nowhere; it is always defined by the
situation of the perceiver's body, which concerns not simply location
and posture, but action in pragmatic contexts and interaction with
other people. The claim is not simply that the perceiver/actor is
objectively embodied, but that the body is in some fashion experientially present
in the perception or action. Phenomenologists distinguish
the pre-reflective body-awareness that accompanies and shapes every
spatial experience, from a reflective consciousness of the body. To
capture this difference, Husserl introduced a terminological
distinction between Leib and Körper, that is,
between the pre-reflectively lived body, i.e., the body as an embodied
first-person perspective, and the subsequent thematic experience
of the body as an object (Husserl 1973a, 57).

If I reach for a tool, I know where to reach because I have a sense of
where it is in relation to myself. I also sense that I will be able to
reach it, or that I will have to take two steps towards it. My
perception of the tool must involve proprioceptive and kinaesthetic
information about my bodily situation, otherwise I would not be able
to reach for it or use it. If in such cases, we want to say that I
have an awareness of my body, such bodily awareness is quite different
from the perception that I have of the tool. I may have to look or
feel around in order to find where the tool is; but, under normal
circumstances, I never have to do that in regard to my body. I am
tacitly aware, not only of where my hands and feet are, but also of
what I can do with them. This tacit awareness of my body always
registers as an “I can” (or “I can't,” as the
case may be). Pre-reflective body-awareness is not a type of
object-perception, but it is an essential element of every such
perception. Primarily, my body is experienced, not as an object, but
as a field of activity and affectivity, as a potentiality of mobility
and volition, as an “I do” and “I can.”

The body provides not only the egocentric spatial framework for
orientation towards the world, but also the constitutive contribution
of its mobility. Perception does not involve a passive reception, but
an active exploration of the environment. Husserl calls attention to
the importance of bodily movements (the movements of the eye,
manipulations by the hand, the locomotion of the body, etc.) for the
experience of space and spatial objects. He further claims that
perception is correlated to and accompanied by
proprioceptive-kinaesthetic self-sensation or self-affection (Husserl
1973c). Every visual or tactile appearance is given in correlation to
a kinaesthetic experience. When I touch a shaped surface, it is given
in conjunction with a sensation of finger movements. When I watch the
flight of a bird, the moving bird is given in conjunction with the
kinaesthetic sensations of eye movement and perhaps neck
movement. Such kinaesthetic activation during perception produces an
implicit and pervasive reference to one's own body. The implicit self-awareness of the actual and possible
movements of my body helps shape the experience that I have of the
world. To be clear, however, bodily self-awareness is not an awareness
of the body in isolation from the world; it is embedded in action and
perception. We do not first become aware of the body and subsequently
use it to engage with the world. We experience the world bodily, and
the body is revealed to us in our exploration of the world. Primarily,
the body attains self-awareness in action (or in our dispositions to
action, or in our action possibilities) when it relates to something,
uses something, or moves through the
world.[4]

Bodily self-awareness, like self-consciousness more generally, has
limitations. I am never fully aware of everything that is going on
with my body. Indeed, my body tends to efface itself as I perceive and
act in the world. When I jump to catch a ball that is thrown over my
head, I certainly have a sense of what I can do, but I am not aware of
my precise movements or postures—for example, that my right leg
bends at a certain angle as I reach with my left hand. I can execute
movements without being explicitly conscious of them, and even what I
am tacitly aware of is somewhat limited—for example, I am not
aware of the shape of my grasp as I reach to grab the ball. Although I
may not be aware of certain details about my bodily performance, this
does not mean however that I am unconscious of my body. Rather it
means that the way that I am aware of my body is fully integrated with
the intentional action that I am performing. I know that I am jumping
to catch the ball, and implicit in that, as an immediate sense rather
than an inference, is the experience of my body jumping to catch the
ball. Furthermore, experiential aspects of my embodiment permeate my
pre-reflective self-consciousness. There is something it is like to
jump to catch a ball, and part of what it is like is that I am in fact
jumping. There is something different to what it is like to sit and
imagine (or remember) myself jumping to catch the ball, and at least
part of that difference has to do with the fact that I am sitting rather than jumping, although none of this may be
explicit in my experience.

Another way to think of this is to consider the sense of agency that
is normally an aspect of pre-reflective self-awareness in action. If,
as I am walking down the street, I am pushed from behind, I am
instantly aware of my body moving in a way that I did not intend. The
fact that I feel a loss of control over my actions suggests that there
had been an implicit sense of agency or control in my walking prior to
being pushed. In voluntary action, I experience the movements of my
body as my own actions, and this is replaced by a feeling of loss of
bodily control in the case of involuntary movement. Voluntary actions
feel different from involuntary actions, and this difference depends
respectively, on the experience of agency or the experience of a lack
of agency—as the case may be if my body is being moved by
someone else.

A focus on embodied self-experience inevitably leads to a decisive
widening of the discussion. The externality of embodiment puts me, and
my actions, in the public sphere. Self-consciousness involves not only
an ability to make reflective judgments about our own beliefs and
desires but also includes a sense of embodied agency. I am, as Paul
Ricoeur (1950, 56–57) points out, conscious of being the author of
my actions, and this kind of awareness often comes about as my actions
are reflected in the presence of others. I can become aware of myself
through the eyes of other people, and this can happen in a number of
different ways. Thus, embodiment brings intersubjectivity and
sociality into the picture, and draws attention to the question of how
certain forms of self-consciousness are intersubjectively mediated,
and may depend on one's social relations to others. My awareness of
myself as one person among others, an awareness that I may frame from
the perspective of others, attempting to see myself as they see me,
involves a change in the attitude of self-consciousness. Within this
attitude, judgments that I make about myself are constrained by social
expectations and cultural values. This kind of social
self-consciousness is always contextualized, as I try to understand
how I appear to others, both in the way I look, and in the meaning of
my actions. I find myself in specific contexts, with specific
capabilities and dispositions, habits and convictions, and I express
myself in a way that is reflected off of others, in relevant (socially
defined) roles through my language and my actions.

The role of the other in this mode of self-consciousness is not
unessential. According to Husserl, I become aware of myself
specifically as a human person only in such intersubjective relations
(Husserl 1973b, 175; 1952, 204–05; see Hart 1992, 71; Zahavi 1999,
157ff. Also see Taylor 1989, 34–36 for a similar idea). Thus Husserl
distinguishes the subject taken in its bare formality from the
personalized subject and claims that the origin and status of being a person must be
located in the social dimension. I am not simply a pure and formal
subject of experience, but also a person, with abilities,
dispositions, habits, interests, character traits, and convictions,
and to focus exclusively on the first is to engage in an abstraction
(Husserl 1968, 210). Given the right conditions and circumstances, the
self acquires a personalizing self-apprehension, i.e., it develops
into a person and as a person (cf. Husserl 1952, 265). And this
development depends heavily upon social interaction (Husserl 1973b,
170–171).

This kind of self-consciousness is also the occasion for a
self-alienation, famously explicated by Sartre in terms of the other's
gaze. For Sartre, because “our being, along with its
being-for-itself, is also for-others; the being which is revealed to
the reflective consciousness is for-itself-for-others” (1956,
282). On this view, the primary experience of the other is not that I
perceive her as some kind of object in which I must find a person, but
I perceive the other as a subject who perceives me as an object. My
experience of the other is at the same time an experience that
involves my own self-consciousness, a self-consciousness in which I am
pre-reflectively aware that I am an object for another. This
experience can further motivate a reflective self-consciousness, as I
consider how I must appear to the other.

Merleau-Ponty (1945, 415) suggests that the other's gaze can motivate
this kind of self-consciousness only if I already have a sense of my
own visibility to the other. This sense of my own visibility,
however, is immediately linked with the pre-reflective,
proprioceptive-kinaesthetic sense of my body, an insight that goes
back to Husserl's analysis (mentioned above), through Merleau-Ponty,
who sees its connection to the infant's capability for imitation, and
forward to more recent advances in developmental psychology (see
Merleau-Ponty, 1945, 165, 404-405; 2010; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008;
Zahavi 1999, 171–72). In effect, we find ourselves related to others
through self-conscious experience that is motivated by the other's
gaze.

This is not the place to enter into a detailed discussion of these
rich and complex issues, issues that extend to analyses of phenomena
such as empathy, shame, guilt, and so on (see Zahavi 2010, 2014). But it is
important to realize that self-consciousness is a multifaceted
concept. It is not something that can be exhaustively analyzed simply
by examining the inner workings of the mind.

The notion of self-consciousness has been the subject of a rich and
complex analysis in the phenomenological tradition. Aspects of the
phenomenological analysis also show up in other areas of research,
including feminism (Stawarska 2006; Young 2005; Heinämaa 2003), ecological psychology
(Gibson 1966), and recent analyses of enactive perception (Noë
2004; Thompson 2008). The recognition of the existence of a primitive
form of pre-reflective self-consciousness is an important starting
point for an understanding of more elaborate forms of
self-consciousness that are concept- and
language-dependent. Phenomenological analyses show these processes to
be more than purely mental or cognitive events since they integrally
involve embodiment and intersubjective dimensions.

Lowe, E.J., 2000. An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lycan, W.G., 1987. Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.

Meltzoff, A., 1990a. “Foundations for developing a concept of self:
The role of imitation in relating self to other and the value of
social mirroring, social modeling, and self practice in infancy,” in
D. Cicchetti M. Beeghly (eds.) The Self in Transition: Infancy to
Childhood, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 139–164.

–––, 1990b. “Towards a developmental cognitive
science: The implications of cross-modal matching and imitation for
the development of representation and memory in infancy,” Annals
of the New York Academy of Science, 608: 1–31.

–––, 2002. “First-person thoughts and embodied
self-awareness: Some reflections on the relation between recent
analytical philosophy and phenomenology,” Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences, 1, 7–26.

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